Could a person migrate from one human body to another?
An exploratory article on the mind and the mind-body relationship
Freaky Friday, Get Out, Your Name. Humans have long contemplated the idea of migrating a person’s mind from body to body. But to what extent could such a migration occur? If the mind could be extracted and implanted elsewhere, would the original person truly survive that transfer?
In this essay, I will argue that because the mind and body are interdependent, and because no existing theory of consciousness provides a coherent mechanism for complete mind‑migration, thus we can at best create a duplicate but never permit the original subject’s complete self to continue in the new body.
What constitutes a “person”?
Before assessing the possibility of mind migration, we must clarify what is being migrated. A person’s identity is not merely a bundle of memories. It comprises how one interprets sensory data, forms thoughts and emotions, stores experiences, and sustains a sense of continuity of subjectivity over time. Subjectivity means the awareness of being “oneself”; we can never embody the experience of a bat despite knowing all the physical properties of it, because we lack the bat’s subjectivity.
For migration to succeed, the recipient would need not only identical memories and cognitive patterns achievable by a convincing simulation, but also identical first‑person awareness.
Problem 1: The Mind’s Dependency on the Body
The first problem with mind migration is that a mind doesn’t exist in isolation, but rather depends on the brain. The brain is a dynamical system whose physical properties shape mental states. Consider the mind as an algorithm written on a specific operating system called the brain; like any algorithm that is written within an operating system, a mind generated within one brain will not run identically on another. This means even if we perfectly replicate the mind from one brain to another, the different brains will inevitably result in diverging subjective experiences.
The mind is also dependent on the entire body. The immediate lived experience of a particular body is the root of a self-awareness which underlies our perceptions and thoughts. For example, motor activity, sensory feedback, and bodily posture all influence cognition. Therefore, transferring the mind to a new body with different physical properties and sensory capacities would unavoidably change how that mind operates.
In addition, the influence of sociocultural factors means our bodies shape how our minds perceive and are perceived. Societal norms about traits like gender and physical appearance are internalised into self-conception. A person migrating into a body with a different gender, age, and so on, would be treated differently. Over time, this social feedback would reshape their beliefs, priorities, and self-identity. Any attempt to migrate a person’s mind without accounting for the social impact of a new body fails to preserve who that person truly is.
Problem 2: The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Even if we could transfer memories and cognitive traits from one body to another, the core question remains: would the self — the conscious subject — move with them? This is the crux of the “hard problem of consciousness”: explaining how physical processes give rise to subjectivity. Any answer to the mind-migration question depends on how we understand this relationship between consciousness and the body.
A materialist might argue that consciousness is only a functional product of neural activity. Consciousness could be thought of as the collective concept of causal roles amongst physical substances, not physical substance itself. If this is true, then recreating the exact structure of one brain in another body could replicate all its functions that constitute the mind. Migration could be successful if the second subject’s brain mimics the first subject’s functions perfectly. Yet, this approach struggles with a critical objection: replication is not the same as continuation. Even if a second subject behaves and remembers identically to the first, how can we be sure that the first-person awareness has transferred rather than a new one being created? Physical descriptions alone leave out the subjective component of experience. Without explaining how it moves from one body to another, we haven’t explained how a person migrates; we’ve only simulated them.
Substance dualists provide a different resolution by considering consciousness and the body entirely separate. They contend that each person has a non-physical soul that carries their identity. Then, migration could, in principle, succeed if the soul detached from one body and reattached to another. But this raises the interaction question: if the soul is non-physical, how can it causally interact with a physical brain? One answer is to treat the connection between soul and body as a metaphysical relation not explainable by physical processes. But this answer doesn’t help us to understand the process of transferring the soul. This is because if the soul-body relationship is outside of physical processes, it is impossible to construct a fully physical procedure to reassign a soul to another body. Even if a soul had transferred, without access to the soul as an observable entity, no empirical test could distinguish between a migrated soul and a newly formed consciousness. Thus, while substance dualism permits the possibility of migration, it fails to offer a coherent or operational framework for how such a migration could be achieved or validated in practice.
An alternative view — panpsychism — proposes that consciousness is a fundamental feature of all matter. A panpsychist argues that all physical entities have some form of experience, however primitive. If true, this would suggest that the second body already contains its own conscious potential. But this does not imply that one’s consciousness can move into the new body; rather, a different conscious subject may emerge from the new configuration. Continuity of the self is still not preserved.
In contrast, Integrated Information Theory (IIT) offers a middle ground. According to IIT, every conscious experience corresponds to a unique, irreducible shape in a high-dimensional qualia space that represents all information about the experience. This pattern arises from a system’s structure and dynamics. If a perfect replica of that structure could be recreated in a second body, then the same pattern — and potentially the same experience — could emerge. But again, this would be a new instantiation, not a transfer. The original consciousness would still be tied to the original brain, unless we assume some way of “moving” this informational shape — which the theory does not provide.
So where does this leave us? Each framework gives us different insights, but none offers a satisfying path for a complete migration. If consciousness is entirely physical, then identity hinges on physical continuity, and transferring function does not guarantee transferring the conscious self. If consciousness is non-physical, then we lack the means to relocate it. And if consciousness is fundamental, then it may be more accurate to say a new consciousness arises in the second body rather than one moving from another.
Conclusion
On the surface, a complete mind migration seems conceivable if the mind is simply a collection of data that could be transferred, like files between computers. But the deeper we examine this idea, the more this answer is shown to be insufficient. The mind isn’t just data, and the body isn’t a neutral container. The mind is constantly interacting with the body in ways we are only beginning to understand. The notion of migration requires not just replication of memories and traits, but the continuity of subjectivity — a single thread of awareness traveling from one body to another. No existing theory of consciousness offers a mechanism for this. Even if memories and behaviours could be duplicated, the resulting entity would not be the same person.
Therefore, the answer to our central question is clear: a person cannot fully migrate from one human body to another. Migration would not preserve the self; it would at best create a convincing duplicate.